


Two Strangers On The Mend

by luninosity



Series: Holiday Fic [10]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Commitment, Confessions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, Fireworks, First Time, Fourth of July, Holidays, Love Confessions, M/M, Mansion!fic, Past Abuse, Pineapple Vodka, Sexual Content, s'mores are delicious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-18 17:15:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/563476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Independence Day at the mansion. Fireworks, painful memories, beautiful first times, s’mores.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Strangers On The Mend

**Author's Note:**

> More holiday fic! Warnings for vague mention of Charles's unpleasant childhood and some not-very-explicit sex with Erik. Title and opening lines from “Overdrive,” by the Foo Fighters.

_yours and mine and left and right_   
_there's still two sides to everyone_   
_you and I get on with life_   
_and pray we'll find a better one_

Independence Day. The great state of New York is celebrating its freedom. The sun’s barely gone down and the lightshows’ve promptly begun, scattering reds and blues and greens and pinks like spilled confetti over the velvet backdrop of the sky. Smoke—from the explosions, from the ritualistic barbecues of the day—winds heavenward, casually.

The children are out on the extensive mansion grounds, in a space thoughtfully cleared of anything potentially incendiary the day before. They’re playing with some of Hank’s experimental firework attempts. Some of the trials succeed, fantastically. Others not so much. Everyone laughs, in either case, in the end.

They look youthful and carefree and relaxed, for one moment, just one moment, maybe the first moment since they’ve all come here, not so very long ago, and Charles isn’t with them, and that’s wrong.

Erik’s been searching for blue eyes and disheveled hair for twenty minutes now, since he’d decided that he himself would never possess any patience for mock cannon-bursts and giddy remembrances of war. He’d glanced around, intending to spot Charles and ask whether they couldn’t just go play chess.

Hadn’t seen Charles anywhere. Hadn’t been able, searching his memory, to find any trace of fuzzy sweaters or that scruffily polished Oxford accent having followed them out onto the lawn at all.

He’s always been good at stealth. He’d put that well-practiced ability to use until he’d made it out of sight of all the children. Then he’d run for the mansion.

It’s not panic. Or fear. It isn’t. He, Erik, doesn’t panic, and he most assuredly doesn’t feel fear. Other people fear _him_. He’s not afraid of losing Charles.

He’s just thought about losing Charles. And his heart performs a complicated sort of tap-dance, inside his chest.

_Charles_ , he says, standing desperately in the first-floor hallway, unsure which way to go.

_Oh—sorry, Erik. I’m up here._ A spark of image, like candlelight in darkness: Charles is standing up on the third-floor balcony, the one outside his own room, and for just a second Erik can see the world with two sets of eyes, himself borrowing Charles’s sensations like the refractions of a kaleidoscope, and it should be disconcerting but mostly he’s too relieved to notice. Charles is here. Not gone.

When did Charles not being gone become so important to him?

He doesn’t have an answer and neither do the placid stone-and-mortar walls of the ancestral house, so instead he sprints up the stairs and waves a hand at the lock on Charles’s door and feels it jump out of the way, obedient to his bidding. It doesn’t mind opening for him. It’s worried about Charles, too.

“Charles,” he says, out loud this time, and then doesn’t have any sufficient words to follow that name. What can he say? You were missing for twenty minutes and I think I panicked and I’ve never felt this way about anyone else’s welfare and I don’t know why I’m smiling except that you’re smiling too?

Charles tilts his head, quizzically. “You smile when I’m smiling?”

“I…it’s not polite to eavesdrop. Why were you keeping us all from noticing that you’d left?”

“You were thinking very loudly, and I couldn’t help it. I was…I’m simply not in a festive mood, Erik, it’s fine.” Charles smiles one more time. In the background, a rose shape, a waterfall, a planet with rings, all blossom and fade, leaving afterimages that linger like a halo.

Erik takes the two steps out onto the balcony, into the open air and the breeze that carries the scent of celebration up to them. That smile is a real one—Charles is pleased to see him, he thinks—but it’s not happy, either. Weary, around the edges. Disappearing like the fireworks.

He doesn’t mind Charles eavesdropping. He’s always said he does, and he ought to—his mind is _his_ , one of the only privacies he has left—but somehow it’s always felt natural. Of course Charles can hear his thoughts, can answer the words Erik doesn’t say. Charles will never use those thoughts to hurt him. Erik believes this the same way he knows his own name. Just another part of who he is.

He looks at Charles, standing there framed by old stone and railings that for some reason don’t seem high enough, sleeves shoved up to his elbows and a small burn mark on one arm from this morning’s training session with Alex.

“You…weren’t in a festive mood…so you made yourself a very colorful drink?”

“Oh, this…” Charles looks at the glass as if surprised by its presence. “I needed one, after—I was feeling rather arbitrary. And we had pineapple vodka.”

“I see.”

The light from the distant fireworks explodes and fades, over Charles’s skin.

“What’s in it?”

“Oh…the pineapple vodka, orange juice, quite a lot of something pink and sugary…I’m not drunk.” Charles studies the drink, in his hand, as if wondering why not, as if he’d rather be. “In case you were wondering.”

“I know you’re not.”

“Yes, you do.” Charles almost-smiles again, at him. _You believe me, when I say that. It’s refreshing_.

Erik thinks about this answer, while he plucks the concoction out of Charles’s unprotesting hold and takes a swallow, for no other reason than that he can, that he doesn’t like seeing Charles standing so close to the edge of a balcony, alcohol in hand and a broken smile on those lips.

And then raises his eyebrows. “That’s…potent.” _Of course I believe you._

He’s seen Charles drunk, of course—Charles has absolutely no objections to shedding inhibitions and bouncing through the heart of a party like a tipsily flirtatious Oxford-accented comet—but Charles isn’t irresponsible, either. It’s easy to see the pub-crawl familiarity and the bad pick-up lines and the extravagant wealth. Less easy to remember that Charles is a brilliant geneticist, one of the youngest doctors ever to be granted the PhD at that hallowed institution, and possessed of a mind like a compassionate scalpel, endlessly probing and curious and pushing ahead.

Even less easy to observe the moments of quiet, when Charles isn’t smiling or animatedly gesturing or wonderfully excited by some new quirk of mutated genes and tantalizing possibility. The moments when Charles stops talking and simply watches the world, as if he’s a little surprised by it and all its brightnesses. When Charles seems to forget that he, himself, is one of those bright things, and stands there on the outside, an observer, looking in.

“Of course you do.” Charles reclaims his vibrant and deceptively powerful drink, but doesn’t in fact take another sip, idly swirling sticky pink-yellow liquid in the glass. The liquid clings to the sides, viscous trails of color sliding slowly down. “I’ve always liked fireworks. Don’t you?”

“I…don’t know.” He’s never really seen fireworks. Has never watched them properly. They’re reminiscent of gunfire, against the stars. Sharp light interrupting the comforting dark. But then he’s not entirely watching now, either. He’s watching Charles, and blue eyes, in the night.

He’s seen Charles drunk and sober and euphoric and worried and concentrating and victorious at chess and sleepy without morning tea, but he’s never seen this particular expression, this emotion, before.

“Gunfire,” Charles says, “really, Erik…but to be honest, I suppose I can see that as well. Disruptions. Eruptions. Power. Power that fades. I think that’s perhaps why I like them, in the end.”

“Charles…you…are you _certain_ you’re not drunk? Because that’s not even a consistent metaphor.” It’s also frightening, for no good cause, a sensation that capers chillingly along his spine, resisting a name, avoiding labels, but all the more ominous for that. Charles thinks about endings. About burning out, and fading, and falling from the sky.

“Quite certain, thank you.” Followed by a too-large sip, as if wishing to belie that retort. “It’s only…it’s not important. Shouldn’t matter.” _Certainly not to you. You don’t want to know. You’re leaving, aren’t you?_

And the words, the way Charles says them, cut like a knife. To the heart, straight and true: he _has_ been planning—no, not even planning, not that, merely assuming, someplace undefined in the back of his head—that he’ll leave, in the end. That he can’t stay. That the word _home_ can hold no meaning for him, an empty signifier, sound minus substance.

There’s iron in the mansion’s construction. And other metals, copper and steel and aluminum, old bones that hum when Erik lets himself hear them, at the house’s core. They sing calmly to him in the twilight moments before sleep.

And Charles asks the question without bitterness, without anger, with something like resignation or wistfulness or comprehension, as if he can readily believe in Erik not wanting to stay, not wanting to know why those worn sapphire eyes gaze at fireworks with exhausted yearning. Not wanting to care.

Charles, Erik understands between one breath and the next, there beneath the drifting smoke and dwindling rainbow lights, the breezes raising the individual hairs on his arms, literally can’t imagine anyone wanting to care about him. About himself, Charles Xavier, not his brilliance or his myriad useful abilities or his obvious physical charms.

Fundamentally shocked, he can’t speak, and Charles breathes in, and blue eyes slip away, looking out over the lawn, where the children are squabbling goodnaturedly over Hank’s specially-treated sparklers. Small snatches of conversation float up to them, stolen from the night.

“—why do I get the purple one?”

“Nothing wrong with purple. Look, I can write my name!”

“I can write things, too, see?”

“That’s entirely impolite in this company, Alex—”

“Oh, relax, Bigfoot, and draw another pretty flower—”

“That’s not how you draw a flower, _this_ is a flower—”

“That looks like a platypus!”

“Can it still be a platypus if it’s purple?”

Charles smiles, but doesn’t laugh. Erik bites his lip. “Charles? Do you…” He’s not sure what he’s asking. “Do you want a sparkler? I can go and—I can bring you one.”

Charles looks up at him, startled into a wider smile, and it’s filled with such melancholy that even Erik’s own underused heart has to ache. “Oh, no, I’m fine, thank you. I am enjoying watching them. They look so innocent.”

“They’re not.” _You’re not, either. You only appear that way. Charles, what’s wrong?_

“I know. And, of course I’m not. It’s strategic. A tactic to lull you all into complacency, thinking I’m harmless and benign.” _It isn’t…it’s not important. I mean it’s personal. It won’t affect you, or them, or the mission. I won’t let it._

“I knew you had ulterior motives. And since when is personal not the same as important?” _Please tell me._

“I promise to only use my influence for good…” Charles sighs. Leans both elbows on supportive stone. “They’re _not_ the same. Remind me to buy you a new English dictionary.” _It’s just…I’ve had a letter. From my stepbrother._

“You never told me you had a stepbrother.” True, technically. He’s known anyway, ever since the afternoon he’d spent breaking into the CIA’s files and going through every scrap of their admittedly sparse information on the Xavier family. But Charles has never _told_ him.

As if hearing this confession, that distinction, Charles grins. Seems unbothered, if he has just now found out about Erik’s prying. Or maybe he’s not listening in. “Did you want me to tell you?”

“You tell everyone every last detail that’s ever on your mind, Charles.”

“No,” Charles says, “I don’t,” and _that_ one’s like a sword-stroke, so clean and quick that the hurt doesn’t even register until the body’s hit the ground.

“I’m very good at lying to everyone,” Charles continues, while Erik’s busy trying to staunch the flow of blood. “At telling the world I’m all right, and always have been. At being able to pretend. Tell me everything’s all right, Erik.”

“You…want me to lie to you?”

“Yes.” Charles watches the next group of fireworks burst and burn out, scalding the air. “Lie to me. Tell me I can still pretend, with you.”

Erik rests both his own arms on the cool and rough-edged stone. It’s peacefully uneven, to his touch, and content to be so. “Everything is beautiful,” he says, “and nothing is in pain. Not me, not the world, and most assuredly not you.”

And this time Charles does laugh. “Oh, Erik. Thank you, my friend. Exactly what I asked of you.”

“Charles,” Erik says, “please ask me for something else, whatever else you need,” and he recognizes the honesty inside the words as he hears them, billowing out into the night. It throws his previous statement into painful technicolor relief: he wants so badly, all at once, for his own lie to be true.

Charles can’t be hurt. Charles is the good one, the kind one, the one unscarred by tragedy. Erik himself is beyond redemption, but Charles isn’t. Erik believes this with each fiber of his being, every atom that yearns to creep out of the darkness and into the light.

If Charles can’t believe it, what hope does the light have left?

_Charles_ , he says again, not out loud, _how can I help? I would like to help you. If I can_. If Charles will let him. If Charles will let him in.

And the blue eyes, darker than the indigo sky, flick up to meet his. Flit away, hummingbird-quick, and then return and settle, looking into Erik’s own. Charles doesn’t ask whether he means those words. They can both tell.

“It was a…well, rather a strange letter, to be frank. I think he was attempting to apologize, but I’m not certain he actually did, and I couldn’t quite tell what he wants. If he wants anything from me at all.” _He said he wished he’d tried harder. Stopped things. Stepped in on my behalf. A nice sentiment, I suppose._

“Stopped things,” Erik echoes. Things. There’d been no mention of _things_ anywhere in the CIA files.

_Charles, what—_ No. He has an idea, only from that word, from the shades over and around Charles’s mental voice when he’d said it, old ghosts and the corpses of memory. He can’t ask, if Charles wants them to remain buried.

“Why was he sending you a letter now?”

“That’s the great unanswered question. He knew I’d come back here, reopened the house…I think he was hoping to find out why.” _You can ask._

_Then I’m asking._

_You won’t…_ Charles hesitates, awkward under the dying celebrations in the sky. _You thought of me as—as unscarred, earlier. Something beautiful. You’ll think of me differently and it’ll never be the same—_

“You told me,” Erik says, looking directly into those endless eyes, “that personal was not the same as important, in English. You’re wrong.” _Do you have scars, Charles?_

“I’m wrong?” _Yes_.

“You are. This is personal, about you, you said. Not something that matters to anyone except yourself. But…” He reaches out, cautiously. Brushes a curl of windblown hair back, before it can tumble irreverently into wide eyes. Charles appears to be holding his breath.

“This is personal, and it matters to you. And so it is important. To me. Understand?” _Of course I’ll think of you differently. Why do you believe that means negatively?_

Charles blinks at him. Twice. _I—don’t know?_

“Then don’t assume you know what I’m thinking.”

“Erik,” Charles points out, after a second, the faintest hint of laughter recaptured in that voice, a watercolor wash of amusement, “I generally don’t have to _assume_ what anyone’s thinking.”

Erik lets his hand drift down to Charles’s shoulder, inches below his own. Leaves it there. Neither of them protests. _What am I thinking, then?_

_You—oh—oh, Erik, you want—you don’t want me to show you those memories, you can’t—_

_You’re in my head, Charles, quit being stubborn for the sake of stubbornness_.

There’s a split second of surprise, and then the laughter comes up and floods both their thoughts with warmth, effervescence and lemon-drop sweetness and hot tea and sunshine in the middle of night. Erik licks his lips, involuntarily, and Charles says _Sorry!_ and laughs again.

_You’re right, I’m sorry, I do believe you, I KNOW you mean it, I only—_

_I know._

_All right, then. Ah—apologies if this hurts a bit, I’ve never tried showing anyone any of this and—_

_Charles._

_Here._ A disorienting swirl of light and dark, present time draining away into the past, another night, a different room, the same pale walls, colder stars. A hand landing on his shoulder—not _his_ , Charles’s, and he’s much younger, all elbows and knees and enormous eyes and exuberant hair. The hand is very large, and heavy, and familiar, and the fingers dig in hard enough to bruise.

That’s not the end of the bruises, either. And it’s not the worst of what Charles shows him. In the study, not the room that Charles uses now. In younger Charles’s own bedroom, at night, weighty steps advancing down the hall. The shock of cracking bone, the first time Charles tried to fight back, and the explanations: _he fell down the stairs, yes, he’s a clumsy one, this one, no doubt we’ll be back at the hospital soon enough…_

_Sometimes I tried to make him stop,_ Charles says, into the haze of red and black and blood over carpet and the wooden scent of an antique desk, furniture polish and leather and pain. The words interrupt the flood of sensation, and give Erik solid ground to cling to amid the agony, and he briefly feels less like he’s drowning.

_Sometimes it worked. But I was quite a lot younger and didn’t have very precise control and I was afraid I’d hurt everyone—my mother, Cain, and Raven, later—and if he was hurting me, well, then he wasn’t tormenting them._

_Charles, you—_

_I could make him forget that Raven existed, could confuse him on the way to my mother’s room. But I’d have to be close, for that—I didn’t have the range that I do now. So he’d always see me._

Charles offers those last five words in a tone that’s almost detached. A statement of fact. Clinical: if a, then b. An expected result.

In the horrified silence they both feel younger Charles fall into bookshelves, and then to the floor, and hear a laugh: _you like the books, don’t you? Always reading, never here when I want you. See if you still like books after this_. Impacts that leave curiously-shaped marks, the corners of hard-bound tomes painted over fragile skin in blue and purple. The stinging lines of paper-cuts, over and over again, until Charles’s body is red instead of white and the pages look as though they’ve been inexpertly dyed.

Other wounds, more unspeakable, once Charles is already lying brokenly on a bed of crumpled pages and crushed expensive volumes. The books try their best to be a cushion against the tearing pain. They’re inadequate; not their fault.

Charles on the floor, alone except for the helplessly scattered detritus of words on paper, finally giving in to tears.

Worried eyes peering at him around the doorway, and Erik knows that they belong to Charles’s stepbrother without needing to ask. _Sorry_ , Cain whispers, _I can’t help you, if I help you I—_

Charles, battered, bleeding, lifts his head and says _I know, it’s all right_ and Cain bites his lip and vanishes and Charles, once he finally makes it to his feet, finds a lukewarm cup of tea and a chocolate-chip cookie sitting just inside the door, tucked mostly out of sight behind a table and pretending very hard to have been forgotten there accidentally.

Charles, then and now, smiles, just a little.

_He tried to help you_ , Erik says.

_As much as he could. We were never friends—we couldn’t be—but we were both there._ Charles shrugs, in their heads, like the swing of clouds across the moon. _Don’t think that he was on my side. He used to hit me, too, you see. Mostly when his father was looking. To prove how little sympathy he felt for me. But he’d think the words I’m sorry while he did it, not that he knew I could hear._

In the distance, the rumble of fireworks hits a lull. A pause, preparing for the big finish, the grand finale, lighting up the sky.

Erik wants to say he’s sorry, too, but he can’t use those words, not with the imprint of Charles’s last confession searing the space between them. He doesn’t know what he _can_ say. He’s never guessed. Never imagined this. And he prides himself on being able to read people, to detect guilt, to know when someone’s lying, to extract information a target doesn’t want him to hear. And Charles has always been so easy to read, guileless and open and honest and enthused about the world.

Charles has never been easy to read. Charles isn’t naïve. Charles knows exactly how dark and terrible a place the world can be. And Erik’s never known that about him.

Charles uses all that optimism as a shield, a tactic that Erik the dedicated hunter has never imagined, and it’s a brutally effective one. It’s a challenge and it intrigues him even as it breaks his heart. Charles keeps secrets. From him.

“I don’t,” Charles says, “it’s not as, ah, dramatic, as deliberate, as you think. At least not by now. Now it’s mostly habit. And it’s not as if anyone else’s lives will be enriched by this particular knowledge.”

“Habit.” _That’s worse_. Charles shrugs again, and doesn’t answer. Erik says, _you told me,_ because it’s true. That’s real.

“I suppose I did. But then I’m not trying to keep secrets from you.” _I trust you_.

The aged stone of the balcony doesn’t shift, but Erik finds himself feeling off-balance regardless, at the simplicity of that statement. He doesn’t know how to respond, so he goes with, “You were surprised. When he sent you a letter…”

“Very much so.” _We’ve not spoken in years. He left for college on a football scholarship—American football, that is, my stepfather would’ve had a heart attack much earlier if his son’d played any other sport—and I went to Oxford and never looked back._

_Charles—_

_Are you all right? I think I might’ve shown you more than—that did hurt, I can tell, here—_ Blissful coolness, soothing away the throbbing phantoms of pain. Snowdrifts and mint and ice over purely mental bruises. _Better?_

_Are you?_

_I’m all right._

_I never asked you to lie to me._

_I’m not_. Charles takes a step closer. Erik’s hand slides to his waist, rests on a hip. It should be too intimate a gesture, but it isn’t. “I’m all right,” Charles says, out loud, blue eyes looking into Erik’s, inches away. “I told you I had scars. I do. But that means the actual wounds’ve more or less healed.”

“Scars can still hurt.” Erik lifts his other hand. Trails fingers over Charles’s cheek, in the moonlight, not even the excuse of combing away hair this time. That skin feels like silk, to his exploring touch, and Charles breathes in and out and doesn’t move away. Charles’s abandoned drink watches them, from the railing, pink and yellow and sticky and observant.

“If I touch you,” Erik says, “if I touch you, here, does this hurt?”

“No.” _No_.

“If I kiss you…” _Can I kiss you, Charles?_

“Yes,” Charles says, _yes, Erik, yes, please kiss me_ , so Erik does.

Charles tastes like pineapple vodka and sugar and the chill of the night air, elemental and sweet and clear. Their heartbeats speed up in time with each other and Charles laughs, astonished happiness spilling over into the kiss, and Erik chases the sound with his tongue, seeking out all the mirthful hidden spaces of that mouth, those lips. Charles is wearing cufflinks, metal ones, and they chime, beckoning, and that encouragement ends up shared too, a back and forth and weaving together that will never end.

_I like the way you kiss me_ , Charles admits, delightedly, as if disclosing some heretofore unknown scientific fact, a brilliant new discovery, a revelation.

_I like kissing you,_ Erik retorts, because he’s feeling precisely the same way. Unquestionable. Inarguable. Truth.

_Bedroom_ , Charles suggests, and does something extremely interesting with his tongue. Erik starts to say _yes_ , because absolutely yes, as fast as physically possible, and then the sky erupts into a dizzying spectacle of coruscating light and sound, because the universe has zero understanding of the concept of subtlety. But when he looks into dark blue eyes they’re laughing, sparkling more brightly than the fireworks overhead, so Erik just kisses him again, and then again, as they run inside, hand in hand.

Charles blushes, when Erik peels him out of the ridiculously professorial shirt and vest and pants, but doesn’t protest being naked, at least not aloud. _I’ve never actually let anyone—_

Erik stops, halfway out of his own clothing, and stares at Charles through his shirt. “You have done this—I mean, you do know you want to—you want—”

“Of course I want you!” _I only meant…if you wanted to…I have done this before, with men, yes, but I’ve only ever, ah, been on top. As it were. But if you wanted…_

“Do you want me to?” He finishes disposing of his inconvenient attire. Gathers Charles back into his arms, and walks them both over to the breathlessly waiting bed. Goes back to the kissing, learning the ways that Charles likes to be touched, finding the spots that earn little gasps and make Charles arch up into his hand. Erik himself doesn’t have much experience in this area—those encounters have been, of necessity, few and far between and brief—but he trusts his instincts. And Charles makes some very encouraging sounds.

He’d always imagined that Charles would have an academic’s body, soft and white and with enticing curves, and that’s half true. Charles certainly isn’t as well-toned as Erik himself, but those sturdy muscles aren’t the product of being deskbound, either.

_I like running—_

_Oh, you do?_ Perhaps they can go running together, sometime. Charles has short legs and Erik’s are too long, but they can make it work.

He licks the thin skin over one hipbone, enchanted. He’d been half right about the fairness, too. Charles does have very pale skin, it practically glows under the caress of the starlight, but there are also freckles, treasure-dustings of ruby and gold, and Erik’s never imagined _that_ , and he wants to taste each one.

_Yes!_ Charles says, into their thoughts.

Erik grins. _Yes to the running, or to this?_

_Both!_

_Excellent._ He nibbles his way along Charles’s thigh, following an especially delectable line of cinnamon sprinkles, and then pauses, having encountered something else. _What’s this from?_

Charles tips his head up to look. Of course he does; there can’t be much sensation in that knot of scar tissue. _Ah…letter opener. Sharpened. He used to—_

Erik’s rage hits them both like a thunderclap, silent but deafening.

“Erik, please!” _It’s fine, I’m fine, it wasn’t—it wasn’t quite as bad as you think. He used to keep it on the desk, and he…liked to have me, um, on the desk as well, and that one really was an accident—_

“You can’t tell me he hurt you by accident!” _You could have died!_ The scar’s too close to an artery. Sits there like a shiny and malevolent spider on exposed and vulnerable skin. And there’re other scars as well. He can see them, now that he’s looking, silvery traceries like spider’s-webs drawn through the freckles, in the dim evening light.

“Yes, but I didn’t!” _I’m not excusing him. Believe me, Erik, I’m not. It wasn’t all right. It isn’t. But I am, now. Most days, more often than not, and now, right now, when you look at me like you want to kiss me and I feel wonderful—_

_You are!_ “You _are_.”

“And you’re giving me that.” Charles reaches for him, tugs him back down into the nest of pillows and blankets and welcoming limbs. “You are helping. This is helping. Can you go back to what you were doing, earlier, maybe…?”

“I…Charles, I lo—did you mean this? Or would you rather I try _this_ instead?”

“Mmm…either. Both. Everything. I love you.”

“You—”

“Yes, you heard me correctly.” _I love you, Erik_.

“Charles,” Erik whispers, looking down into jewel-blue eyes, bruised and shadowed but not broken, meeting his own gaze fearlessly, with affection, _I love you, too_.

“Oh, I know.” Teasing. This is Charles teasing him. In bed. Charles loving him.

Of course it is. This is everything they’ve both ever wanted and never expected to have and found at last in each other. This _is_ everything.

_I want you_ , Charles says. _I want you to…to do this. With me. Please._

“I love you,” Erik says again, because he needs them both to hear it out loud, and Charles smiles, and Erik murmurs _Yes, do that, please_ , and Charles laughs.

“You…” He hesitates. Runs a hand over the closest hip. “If we’re…if I’m going to be your…first…”

“You _are_ my first.” _The only one who counts_.

“Then we’re taking this very slowly, all right?” _Do you have…lotion? Something to…_

_…make this easier? In the drawer, over there._ “And…mmm, do that again…you can be a bit less slow than _that_. I’m not going to break.”

_No_ , Erik says, touching him, easing him open, fingers and tongue and everything else he can think of, _you’re not_. And when he finds the spot that leaves Charles gasping, white heat pouring through both their thoughts, he grins, and keeps his fingers busy, stroking, there.

_Erik—Erik, please, I want you, I have to—but I want you in me when I—please—_

He’s not going to say no to Charles asking for that. So he slips his fingers out and away and moves, before Charles can do anything more than catch his breath at the emptiness.

_Is this all right?_

_Yes—_

_More?_

_Yes!_

He tries to be cautious. Gentle. Manages self-control until the exact second Charles lifts one leg and wraps it around his waist, and those startlingly strong academic’s hands slide up and tug at Erik’s shoulders, and when he looks at blue eyes they’re wide and bright and shining with the deepest joy in the world.

_Erik, I love you._

_Charles, I…thank you. For this, for trusting me with—I love you._

“Thank you,” Charles says, out loud, and then starts laughing, “Erik, no, I ought to be thanking _you_ , you—this feels marvelous and I—” _Of course I trust you with this. I trust you with everything. All of me. And you do feel marvelous._

“You can still talk? I must not be putting forth enough effort…” _Still marvelous?_

_Oh—you—that—yes!_

Yes. And that ecstasy flares up between them, every sensation shared and doubled and reflected in bodies and minds, and Erik thinks about fireworks one more time, or maybe that’s Charles, or it doesn’t matter because they’re both right there at the heart of the explosion, the soundless supernova, the space where time stops and all the lightwaves joyously hold their collective breaths.

He holds onto Charles, even after they come back to earth. He never wants to move again. Not while Charles is also holding him.

The blue eyes stay open through it all, and Charles doesn’t cry, after, though Erik has the fleeting impression he might want to. But in the end he only blinks once, twice, and laughs again, briefly, wonderingly, beautiful and surprised.

“He asked me, at the end of the letter,” Charles says, in the aftermath, head pillowed lazily on Erik’s shoulder, Erik’s hands wandering up and down and over every delicious inch of that compact frame because he can’t keep himself from the awestruck need to memorize all of Charles in his arms, “if I felt like it, to call him.”

Him. Charles’s stepbrother. Charles is thinking about him, about _that_ , now.

“No! Oh, no, I’m not. Not… _that_. I’m happy, Erik, you know I am.” More shyly, which is astounding because Charles is never, or almost never, shy: _You make me happy, when I’m with you._

_You make me happy, too._ In so many ways. Charles provokes him and pushes him and beats him at chess and disguises complex layers of vulnerability and pain with eagerness and arrogance, and Erik loves him so deeply, for all those reasons. He’s not even surprised he’s never spoken the words before. They’ve been there since the first night of icy water and determined arms, a knowledge that’s simply gone without saying, woven into his mind and heart like a vein of gold. Precious metal, glinting through dark bedrock, there since the formation of the world, only needing to be found.

And he believes the words, the wordless reassurance, that Charles sends him now, a quiet pulse of _yes I’m fine I’m happy rather tired content right here serenity warmth yes_ that resonates through his whole body. Charles really is calm, drowsy and elated and idly turning over options, in his mind.

“Are you going to call him?”

“I don’t know.” Charles runs fingers over Erik’s stomach, absentmindedly tracing shapes, lines, reinventing the letters of the Greek alphabet with one hand. “I feel like I ought to know. One way or the other. I should…want to. Or not want to. But…”

“But you don’t know?”

“I don’t really feel anything. I don’t care. I mean…I do care, it won’t be like talking to a stranger, but…I’ve come to terms with it. Our past. It _is_ past. If he wants to apologize, if he wants to ask why I’ve moved back into the house, if he wants to talk to me…I could listen, but there’s nothing left to heal. Only the scars.” _And you’re helping me with those._

_I’ll always help you with those_. “You don’t hate him?” He would. He’d probably hate every person who’d inhabited that house, who’d never lifted a finger in defense of Charles. He _does_.

_You’re rattling my dresser drawers._

_Sorry!_

_No, they don’t mind. They know you’re offering to help, and so do I. I love you_. “And, no…I don’t think I do.” Charles sets his chin on Erik’s chest, considerately nestled in one hand so as not to hurt, and the eyes go darker, momentarily, pensive. “I did. For a very long time. I hated all of them. My stepfather for obvious reasons. My mother for never caring enough to see, to give a damn, to try to stop it. Cain for thinking that a cup of tea and a cookie would ever make the fists, the bruises, the…other things, better somehow…”

_I’m sorry_ , Erik says, and holds Charles against him a bit more tightly. _I love you. I’m here now, and I love you._

_Yes, you are._ The room brightens, despite the cessation of fireworks, with the force of Charles’s smile. “I don’t hate them. Cain was only doing the best he could, then. That’s all any of us can do. Sometimes we fail, but at least we try.” _I didn’t return for my mother’s funeral. I knew she was dying, but I didn’t want to be there for her when she’d never done the same for me. I told myself I had exams, and it was even true. A week later I got a very dry lawyer’s note saying she’d left everything to me in her will. I hated myself, for a while, too, after that._

“Optimist,” Erik says, because it’s true, and he means it to be teasing, and it is, but the word comes out faintly awestruck, too. Charles _is_ an optimist. Not naïvely so, the way Erik’d once assumed. Painfully, agonizingly, purposefully so. It’s a hard-fought optimism. With battle scars.

_Oh, that’s much too heroic-sounding, Erik, honestly. Stop thinking that._

_Never. I love you._

_You know I love you._

_Yes, you do._

_Erik…_ Charles hesitates. Doesn’t ask the question, but Erik can hear it anyway, can see it, reflected in those depthless eyes.

He smiles, doubtless with too many teeth, in response. Tangles his legs into Charles’s shorter ones. Runs a hand through all the improbable hair. “It’s still Independence Day, correct?”

“For another… hour and four minutes it is, yes?” Charles peeks at the clock, over Erik’s shoulder. Then bites his lip, and the anxiety creeps in around the edges of previous contentment, tiny scurrying shadows that whisper insidiously to Charles that he’s not wrong about himself, that Erik wants his independence, that Erik’s going to casually toss aside everything they’ve just found out into the night like unwanted refuse. That Erik, in short, is going to leave.

“Charles,” Erik says, “you really need to stop thinking those things. Why does your nervousness taste like black licorice, in my head?”

“Ah…I despise black licorice. It’s not always food-related, but I might be hungry. Are you saying—what are you saying?”

“If you feel like getting up, I can find you food. Anything you’d like, in particular _?” Independence Day is about freedom, correct? The freedom to choose, to make one’s own choices, uncontrolled by the demands of anyone else?_

_I…suppose it is, yes?_ “Why the sudden American history lesson, again? And, no, nothing specifically in mind. We can explore the depths of the kitchen, if you’d like.”

“I do enjoy explorations, with you…” _As for why…this is why. I want you. I’m choosing you. And your optimism. And every one of your scars. I told you I’d be here to help, when they ache. I’ll be here forever, if you want that._

_Yes! Yes, I do, I want you, yes—I love you—_ and Charles is kissing him, now, everywhere, and the sensation in their heads is like sunlight on water, heat soaking into their bones, joy quivering in the air. _Yes_.

_Marshmallows?_ Erik inquires, after a second, and Charles laughs again, not actually embarrassed. _I did tell you I was hungry, and it is—for another hour and three minutes, now— the Fourth of July…_

_Marshmallows and chocolate? And graham crackers?_

_Oh, you’ve never had s’mores!_

_I’ve never had what?_

Charles stops kissing him long enough to say, “Clearly I’ll have to show you,” and Erik studies the offered mental image quizzically. But if Charles wants to, then he will try.

_I know you will. I KNOW._ “Hmm…I’ve just had a fantastic idea.”

“Should I be afraid?”

“Not at all. Come on, we should probably be dressed, for this!”

“Charles,” Erik says plaintively, arms feeling deprived the second that freckled warmth bounces up and out of them, “do we have to?” He’s _tired_. In a good way, of course, satisfied and fulfilled and sleepy, but still. Shouldn’t Charles be tired, too? Even more so? In other ways?

But Charles pauses, there beside the bed, and tips his head and grins. That irrepressible hair’s falling into his eyes and he’s cheerful and impatient and looking positively energized, radiating all that pleasure in practically tangible waves, and Erik shakes his head and rolls out of bed, grinning too, helplessly.

“You want me to bring along wire hangers?”

“Yes I do. It’ll make sense in a minute, I promise.”

“Can I kiss you on the way?”

“Not if I kiss you first,” Charles says, which doesn’t make any sense at all, but Erik’s not going to complain, because suddenly he has an armful of wire coat hangers and gleeful Charles.

Outside, the night is cool and sweet, the lingering glitter of brightly-colored paper and spent rockets on the lawn. The children’ve all wandered off somewhere, presumably to their beds or at least someone else’s, and the tiny breeze from earlier pops back out to toy flirtatiously with hair and rolled-up shirtsleeves.

They don’t talk, much, for the next few busy minutes. Erik makes a fire in the cavernous firepit, accompanied by some vague smugness about how quickly he gets the job done; Charles tosses a smile his direction, and goes back to setting out chocolate and various accoutrements, and touching Erik, always, in some way, at the same time.

He laughs in harmony with the wind, when Erik plucks the wire hanger out of his hand without touching it and holds Charles’s and his own and three more marshmallows in the fire, all at once. They come out toasted _perfectly_. S’mores, Erik decides, are a brilliant idea; and leans his shoulders against Charles’s, in the night.

“About Cain,” Charles says, after a while, licking melted chocolate from his fingers, “about making choices…I have, I think. Decided.”

Erik sets down all their marshmallow skewers, carefully, still without touching them. Wants to wrap an arm around Charles’s shoulders, and then remembers that he _can_ , so he does. Charles smiles up at him, for the gesture. “What do you want to do?”

“I think I’d like to see him. I…he made the initial gesture. I wouldn’t mind…knowing why. I might call him, tomorrow. I could ask if he’d like to meet somewhere in the city. He did give me his number.”

The fire cracks and pops and sends sparks flying up into the sky, cozy and confidently blazing away, and Erik settles his other arm around Charles, too, and Charles puts both arms about his waist in return. They stand there together, while the firelight plays with skin, paints the outlines of dimly green trees, exchanges elusive and indecipherable smoke-and-cloud signals with the moon.

“Independence Day,” he says, into Charles’s hair, and tastes marshmallow, and chocolate, and woodsmoke, and contentment.

“Yes.”

“You meant both of us. When you said you’d be willing to meet him. Him, and you, and me.”

“I…could’ve meant that, yes. Do you want to be there? With me?”

“As if I’d let you go alone. You told me he used to—of course I want to be there.” Not even a question.

_Erik, I can take care of myself._ “But…thank you.”

_I know you can. It isn’t—I didn’t mean that_. Charles is the strongest person Erik’s ever met, stronger, he thinks, than himself. But even Charles shouldn’t have to do this alone.

And Erik _will_ be there. Just in case. If Charles needs him. Always. That’s his choice. It’s their choice. Together.

And Charles smiles, feeds him a flawlessly toasted marshmallow, and says “Happy Independence Day,” and _Yes_.


End file.
